I am having a very frustrating time trying to find a suitable audio format that I can use in my home network and hope that someone may have a solution.

As an ipod user, I ripped my entire CD collection (500 ish) to the apple lossless (ALAC) format using EAC and itunes encode. I use my ipod in the car as a CD changer, and I purchased a couple of Slim Devices Squeezebox 2's to stream music in the house.

SQ is more important than file size and this is why I chose a lossless format.

I have now recently built myself a Home Theatre PC running Windows Media Center - its main purpose is to house all of my media files (TV, audio and pictures) in one place. It is connected to the screen in the kitchen, and I am going to buy an Xbox 360 to act as media center extender in the lounge. Since the Xbox will only be able to retrieve media files through Windows Media Center, I would like to find a format that will allow me to do this, and therefore not need a separate squeezebox.

I have read a little about the incompatability between itunes and WMP, but it seems that both can play WAV flies, which although disc space hungry, would be acceptable.

This is where the problem starts - I've tried ripping WAV files in iTunes, in WMP, and in EAC but there doesn't appear to be consistency between the folder types.

The ability to capture Album artwork etc through WMP is appealing, particularly when using media center, but although using these different methods is recognised by the different programmes, the file structures which are so important for searching disappear.

Is there a method of ripping WAV files so that they can be viewed in correct folder structures by both itunes and windows media player?

now that i just saw it, i can't seem to find it. Either it's not implemented in the GUI configuration or the daily-builds are using an old version of libavcodec(which i doubt). either case, you can try some builds made by some other people(such as clsid2 or h_yamagata) at http://www.ffdshow.info

now that i just saw it, i can't seem to find it. Either it's not implemented in the GUI configuration or the daily-builds are using an old version of libavcodec(which i doubt). either case, you can try some builds made by some other people(such as clsid2 or h_yamagata) at http://www.ffdshow.info

Libavcodec does now include ALAC support (in fact it has done so for a while). FFMpeg and MPlayer are two examples of Unix/Linux/Mac OS X programs which use Libavcodec and can therefore process ALAC files.

FFDShow is a Directshow filter that use Libavcodec and therefore SHOULD be able to also handle ALAC, hence comments from myself and Mangix to that effect. However when I tried the 'standard' FFDshow package it did not work for me. The theory at the time was that it was possibly due to not having a stream splitter that understood ALAC and could hand it off to FFDShow.

Because I could not get FFDShow to work I continued searching and eventually using code from three different programmers got a solution (see below).

The ALAC directshow filter I am using is written using the BASS library see http://www.un4seen.com and an ALAC module written by Maresweb (using BASS) the source for which is here http://www.maresweb.de/projects/bass/alac.php this was then repackaged as a directshow compatible filter by Milenko Mitrovic (using the same technique he had previously used for an MP3 directshow filter version of a BASS module) and his website is http://www.dsp-worx.de you will need to ask the author for the link to the file (which is NOT based on Libavcodec). This directshow filter has its own m4a (MPEG4 Audio) splitter and in order to make things simple it actually handles both ALAC and AAC (unprotected only) and both are decoded (played) by this filter, this removed the need to try and pass AAC to a different codec. I was perfectly happy with this as AAC does work and I have no protected tracks to worry about.

There is now another possible option listed here http://www.mcetunes.com this works by allowing Media Center to play AAC (even protected iTunes store tracks) and ALAC files using QuickTime.